The Man Who Bought London Read online

She nodded. Presently the door closed behind him with a click, and she dropped her head in her arms upon the table and burst into a passion of weeping. Love had indeed come into the life of Elsie Marion. It had all come upon her unawares, and with its light had brought its shadow of sorrow.

  CHAPTER XI

  ‘Where are you going tonight, Vera?’

  Hermann Zeberlieff addressed the girl who stood by the window with a touch of asperity. The girl was standing by the window looking out across Park Lane to the Park itself. A cigarette glowed between her lips, and the soft, grey eyes were fixed far beyond the limit of human vision. She turned with a start to her half-brother and raised her dainty eyebrows as he repeated the question.

  A simple gown of black velvet showed this slim, beautiful girl to the best advantage. The delicate pallor of the face contrasted oddly with the full, red lips. The shapely throat was uncovered in the fashion of the moment, and the neck of the bodice cut down to a blunt V, showed the patch of pure white bosom.

  ‘Where am I going tonight?’ she repeated; ‘why, that’s a strange question, Hermann – you aren’t usually interested in my comings and goings.’

  ‘I’m expecting some men tonight,’ he said carelessly. ‘You know some of them – Leete is one.’

  She gave a little shudder.

  ‘A most unwholesome person,’ she said. ‘Really, Hermann, you have the most wonderful collection of bric-a-brac in the shape of friends I have ever known. They are positively futurist.’

  He scowled up at her. In many ways he was afraid of this girl, with her rich, drawling, southern voice. She had a trick of piercing the armour of his indifference, touching the raw places of his self-esteem. They had never been good friends, and only the provision of his father’s will had kept them together so long. Old Frederick Zeberlieff had left his fortune in two portions. The first half was to be divided equally between his son – the child of his dead wife – and the girl, whose mother had only survived her arrival in the world by a few hours.

  The second portion was to be again divided equally between the two, ‘providing they shall live together for a period of five years following my death, neither of them to marry during that period. For,’ the will concluded, ‘it is my desire that they shall know each other better, and that the bad feeling which has existed between them shall be dissipated by a mutual understanding of each other’s qualities.’ There were also other provisions.

  The girl was thinking of the will as she walked across to the fireplace, and flicked the ash off her cigarette upon the marble hearth. ‘Our menage as it is constituted ends next month,’ she said, and he nodded.

  ‘I shall be glad to get the money,’ he confessed, ‘and not particularly sorry to –’

  ‘To see the end of me,’ she finished the sentence. ‘In that, at least, we find a subject upon which we are mutually agreed.’

  He did not speak. He always came out worst in these encounters, and she puffed away in thoughtful silence.

  ‘I am going to the Technical College to a distribution of prizes,’ she said, and waited for the inevitable sarcasm.

  ‘The Southwood Institute?’ She nodded. ‘You are getting to be quite a person in the charitable world,’ he said, with a sneer. ‘I shall never be surprised to learn that you have become a nun.’

  ‘I know somebody who will!’ she said.

  ‘Who?’ he asked quickly.

  ‘Me,’ said the girl coolly.

  He sank back again in his chair with a growl.

  ‘It is hard lines on you – my not getting married,’ she went on. ‘You get the whole of the inheritance if I do – during the period of probation.’

  ‘I don’t want you to marry,’ he snarled.

  She smiled behind the hand that held the cigarette to her lips. ‘Poor soul!’ she mocked; then, more seriously: ‘Hermann, people are saying rather horrid things about you just now.’

  He stared up at her coldly. ‘What things, and what people?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, paper people and the sort of bounder person one meets. They say you were in some way associated with –’

  She stopped and looked at him, and he met her gaze unflinchingly.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘With a rather ghastly murder in Southwark,’ she said slowly.

  ‘Rubbish!’ he laughed. ‘They would suspect the Archbishop of Canterbury – it is too preposterous.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ said the girl. ‘I’m positively afraid of you sometimes; you’d just do anything for money and power.’

  ‘Like what?’

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Oh, murder and things like that,’ she said vaguely. ‘There is a lot of good Czech in our blood, Hermann; why, sometimes you exasperate me so that I could cheerfully kill you.’

  He grinned a little uncomfortably. ‘Keep your door locked,’ he said, and his lips tightened as at an unpleasant thought.

  ‘I do,’ she replied promptly, ‘and I always sleep with a little revolver under my pillow.’

  He muttered something about childishness, and continued his study of the evening paper.

  ‘You see,’ she went on thoughtfully, ‘it would make an awful big difference to you, Hermann, if I died suddenly from ptomaine poisoning – or whatever weird diseases people die from – or if I walked in my sleep and fell out of a window.’

  ‘Don’t say such beastly things!’ he snapped.

  ‘It would make you richer by seven million dollars – recoup all your losses, and place you in a position where you could go on fighting that nice grey man – King Kerry.’

  He got up from his chair; there was a ghost of a smile on his face.

  ‘If you’re going to talk nonsense, I’m going,’ he said. ‘You ought to get married; you’re getting vixenish.’

  She laughed, throwing her head back in an ecstasy of enjoyment.

  ‘Why don’t you pick up one of your tame students?’ he sneered. ‘Marry him – you’ll be able to do it in a month – and make him happy. You could teach him to sound his h’s with a little trouble.’

  She had stopped laughing, and was eyeing him as he stood with the edge of the open door in his hand.

  ‘You’ve a merry wit,’ she said. ‘Poor Daddy never realized it as well as I. There’s a coarse fibre in the maternal ancestry of your line, Hermann.’

  ‘You leave my mother’s relations alone!’ he said in a burst of anger.

  ‘God knows I do,’ she said piously. ‘If various United States marshals and diverse grand juries had also left them alone, many of them would have died natural deaths.’

  He slammed the door behind him before she had concluded her sentence. The mocking smile passed from her face as the door closed, and in its place came a troubled frown. She threw away the end of her cigarette and crossed the room to a small writing-table between the two big windows.

  She sat for some time, a pen in her hand and a sheet of paper before her, undecided. If she wrote she would be acting disloyally to her half-brother – yet she owed him no loyalty. Behind her drawling contempt was an ever-present fear, a fear which sometimes amounted to a terror. Not once, but many times in the last year, she had intercepted a glance of his, a look so cold and speculative, and having in it a design so baleful that it had frozen her soul with horror. She thought of the insidious attempts he had made to get her married. The men he had thrown in her way, the almost compromising situations he had forced upon her with every variety of man from college youth to middle-aged man about town.

  If she were married she were dead so far as the inheritance went – if she were not married by the thirtieth of the month, would she still be alive?

  There was, as she knew, a streak of madness on Hermann’s side of the family. His mother had died in an insane asylum. Two of her blood relations had died violently at the hands of the law, and a cousin had horrified San Francisco with a scene of murder of a peculiarly brutal character.

  She had reason to believe that Hermann himself had been mixe
d up in some particularly disgraceful episode in New York, and that only on the payment of huge sums amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars the victim and her relations had staved off an exposure. Then there was the case of Sadie Mars, the beautiful young daughter of a Boston banker. No money could have hushed that up – but here family pride and the position of the girl’s parents saved Hermann. He went abroad, and the girl had taken an overdose of chloral with fatal results. Wherever he went, disaster followed; whatever he touched, he made rotten and bad; he lifted the wine of life to the lips of the innocent, and it was vinegar and gall. She thought all this, and then she began to write rapidly, covering sheet after sheet with her fine calligraphy. She finished at last, enclosed her letter in an envelope, and addressed it. She heard his footstep in the hall without, and hastily thrust the letter into her bosom.

  He looked across at the writing-table as he entered.

  ‘Writing?’ he asked.

  ‘Doing a few polite chores,’ she answered.

  ‘Shall I post them for you?’

  He made a show of politeness.

  ‘No, thank you!’ said the girl. ‘They can be posted in the ordinary way – Martin can take them.’

  ‘Martin is out,’ he said.

  She walked quickly to the bell and pushed it. Hermann looked at her strangely.

  ‘There’s no use ringing,’ he said. ‘I have sent Martin and Dennis out with messages.’

  She checked the inclination to panic which arose in her bosom. Her heart was beating wildly. Instinct told her that she stood in deadly peril of this man with the sinister glint in his eyes.

  ‘Give me that letter!’ he said suddenly.

  ‘Which letter?’

  ‘The letter you have been writing so industriously for the last ten minutes,’ he said.

  A scornful smile curved her lips. ‘Not the keyhole, Hermann!’ she protested with mock pain. ‘Surely not the keyhole – the servants’ entrance to domestic secrets!’

  ‘Give me that letter!’ he said roughly.

  She had edged away and backward till she stood near one of the big French windows. It was ajar, for the evening had been close. With a sudden movement she turned, flung open the long glass door, and stepped out on to the tiny balcony.

  He went livid with rage, and took two quick steps towards her, then stopped. She was addressing somebody.

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, Mr Bray; have you been ringing long?’ An indistinct voice answered her. ‘My brother will let you in; thank you so much for calling for me.’

  She turned to Hermann Zeberlieff.

  ‘Would you mind opening the door to one of my “tame students”? You will find he sounds his h’s quite nicely!’ she said sweetly.

  ‘Damn you!’ snarled the man, but obeyed.

  CHAPTER XII

  ‘Will you entertain Mr Bray whilst I get ready to go out?’

  Hermann muttered his sulky compliance. He would have liked to refuse point blank, to have indulged himself in a display of temper, if only to embarrass the girl; but he had sufficient command of himself to check his natural desire. He scowled at the young man with whom he was left alone, and answered in monosyllables the polite observations which Gordon Bray offered upon men and things. There was no evidence in either the attire or in the speech of the technical student to suggest that he was of any other class than that of the man who examined him so superciliously.

  ‘I gather you’re one of the people my sister is distributing prizes to,’ said Hermann rudely.

  ‘Not exactly,’ said the other quietly. ‘Miss Zeberlieff is very kindly giving the gold medal for drawing, but the Countess of Danbery is actually making the award.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter much who makes it so long as you get it,’ answered Hermann, summarizing his philosophy of life in one pregnant sentence.

  ‘As a matter of fact I am not even getting it,’ said the other. ‘I took this medal last year – it represents an intermediate stage of tuition.’ Hermann walked up and down the room impatiently. Suddenly he turned to the visitor.

  ‘What do you think of my sister?’ he asked.

  Gordon went red: the directness of the question flung at him at that moment caught him unawares. ‘I think she is very charming,’ he said frankly, ‘and very generous. As you know, she interests herself in education and particularly in the schools.’

  Zeberlieff sniffed. He had never set himself the task of keeping track of his sister’s amusements except in so far as they affected his own future. His own future! He frowned at the thought. He had had heavy losses lately. His judgement had been at fault to an extraordinary degree. He had been caught in a recent financial flurry, and had been in some danger of going farther under than he had any desire to go. He had plenty of schemes – big schemes with millions at their end, but millions require millions. He had put a proposition to the girl, which she had instantly rejected, that on the day of the inheritance they should pool their interests, and that he should control the united fortunes.

  If the truth be told, there was little to come to him. He had anticipated his share of the fortune, which was already half mortgaged. In twelve days’ time Vera would be free to leave him – free to will her property wherever she wished. Much might happen in twelve days – the young man might also be very useful.

  His manner suddenly changed. He was perfectly learned in the amenities of his class, and there were people who vowed that he was the ideal of what a gentleman should be. His sister was not amongst these.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down?’ he asked, and took up the thread of technical education with the convincing touch of the dilettante who has all the jargon of science with little backing of knowledge. He kept the young man pleasantly engaged till Vera returned.

  Her car was waiting at the door, and he assisted her to enter. ‘My brother was very entertaining, I gather?’ she said.

  ‘Very.’

  She glanced at him, reading his face.

  ‘You are very enthusiastic,’ she said mockingly.

  He smiled. ‘I don’t think he knows much about architecture,’ he said. He had the habit of wholesome frankness, appreciated here, however, by one who lived in an atmosphere which was neither candid nor wholesome.

  He thought he had offended her, for she did not speak again till the car was running over Westminster Bridge. Then – ‘You will meet my brother again,’ she said. ‘He will discover your address and invite you to lunch. Let me think.’ She knitted her forehead. ‘I am trying to remember what happened before – Oh, yes! he will invite you to lunch at his club, and encourage you to speak about me; and he will tell you that I am awfully fond of chocolates, and a couple of days afterwards you will receive a box of the most beautiful chocolates from an unknown benefactor, and, naturally, when you have recovered from your astonishment at the gift, you will send it along to me with a little note.’

  Whatever astonishment such a happening might have had upon him, it could not exceed that which he now felt. ‘What an extraordinary thing you should have said that!’ he remarked.

  ‘Why extraordinary?’ she asked.

  ‘Well,’ he hesitated. ‘As a matter of fact, he has already asked me my address, and he did mention not once, but twice, that you were awfully fond – not of chocolates, but of crystallized violets.’

  She looked at him a little blankly. ‘How crude!’ was all she said then; but later she half turned on the seat of the limousine and faced him.

  ‘When those violets arrive,’ she said quietly, ‘I want you to take the parcel just as it is – wrapping and string and postmark – to Mr King Kerry: he will understand.’

  ‘King Kerry?’

  ‘Don’t you like him?’ She asked quickly.

  He hesitated. ‘I think I do,’ he replied, ‘in spite of his somewhat drastic methods.’

  Elsie had told him the story of the arrest – indeed, King Kerry had half explained – and now he repeated the story of Elsie’s peril.

  The girl listened e
agerly.

  ‘What a perfectly splendid idea,’ she said enthusiastically, ‘and how like King Kerry!’

  After the distribution, the speechmaking, the votes of thanks, and the impromptu concert which followed the function, the girl sought Bray out, the centre of a group of his fellow-students, who were offering their congratulations, for many prizes had come his way.

  ‘I want you to take me home!’ she said.

  She was a lovely and a radiant figure in her long grey silk coat and her tiny beaver hat; but he saw with tender solicitude that she looked tired, and there were faint shadows under her eyes.

  They had reached a point in their friendship where they could afford to be silent in one another’s society. To him she was a dream woman, something aloof and wonderful, in the world, but not of it – a beautiful fragile thing that filled his thoughts day and night. He was not a fool, but he was a man. He could not hope, but he could – and did – love. From the day she came into his life, an interested – and perhaps amused – visitor to the schools, his outlook had changed. She was very worshipful, inspiring all that is beautiful in the love of youth, all that is pure and tender and self-sacrificing.

  She was, he knew, very wealthy; he dreamt no dreams of miracles, yet he did not regard her money as being an obstacle. It was she, the atmosphere which surrounded her, that held him adoring but passive.

  ‘I want you to do something for me,’ she said.

  ‘I will do anything.’

  There was no emphasis, no fervour in his voice, yet there was something in the very simplicity of the declaration which brought the colour to her cheek.

  ‘I am sure you would,’ she answered almost impulsively; ‘but this is something which you may find distasteful. I want you to meet me in Regent Street tomorrow evening,’ she said. ‘I – I am rather a coward, and I am afraid of people –’

  She did not finish the sentence, and offered no further elucidation to the mystery of a meeting which, so far from being distasteful, set the young man’s heart aflutter afresh.

  ‘At nine o’clock, at the corner of Vigo Street,’ she said, when she left him, at the door of the Park Lane house, ‘and you will have to be very obedient and very patient.’